Non-scientist Khanyi Mbau advocates for herd immunity in response to Covid-19

Khanyi Mbau does not agree with the approach taken by the government and National Command Council on Covid-19.

According to Mbau, the government should not have opted for a lockdown in the aim of flattening the curve to give the nation’s health system adequate time to prepare for the inevitable boom in Covid-19 cases across the country.

Mbau also believes that the pandemic was engineered for the benefit of some or other societal group, government or company. 

Speaking to media personality Macgver Mukwevho on his Podcast and Chill YouTube show, Mbau shared her thoughts. 

“Whoever created this thing, or found a niche. I believe that there was a virus or there was a flu or a bacteria that ran around and really killed people but someone saw a business opportunity in this. How to turn around the economy to work for them. Be it a country, a person/individual you name it or a pharmaceutical company.”

“And a group of people sat together and said ‘how do we break people down?’ Once you put someone into a space where they cannot move freely, you’re already breaking them down. You add fear on that. You take away their freedom and power and sweat, which is money, you have broken them down so much that naturally, your health is gonna go down.

“Then now you’re making them breathe carbon dioxide into their bodies, their immunity goes down further.

“So if you had to come in contact, let’s say you’ve been wearing a mask for two months now. You’ve been home in your sterile environment with your own bacteria, you come into contact with someone else’s bacteria, you’re gonna get sick, regardless but because your immunity is so low, it’s gonna blow out of proportion,” explained Mbau before adding that this is what informed her position advocating for herd immunity. 

According to epidemiologist and infectious diseases specialist Professor Salim Abdool Karim, trying to achieve herd immunity is one of four approaches countries and governments can take with a disease such as Covid. The other three approaches are; the ostrich approach, the partial herd immunity approach and lockdown.

The first is named after an ostrich’s fabled tendency to bury its head in the sand and pretend things are not as bad as they are. He says this was the option taken by US President Donald Trump.

To illustrate the concept of herd immunity, Karim used measles as an example. Based on the world’s treatment of measles, he said that in order to achieve herd immunity, measles taught us that we would have to immunise/vaccinate 95% of the population to protect the remaining and vulnerable 5% of the population from infection.

“We don’t know what the herd immunity level is for the coronavirus. You have no idea how many people are going to have to get infected to protect the entire population,” said Karim in a past interview with News24. 

He listed the UK as a country that had tried this approach, which he says did not work.

Additionally, Karim touched on the idea of partial herd immunity where older people could be placed in lockdown while those under the age of 60 were allowed to continue their lives as normal to a point where enough people got the infection and built up some sort of immunity before older people could be allowed out of lockdown. Sweden tried this approach and Karim said they now had the highest coronavirus death rate in Scandinavia.

From the experiences of those three countries, South Africa went with China’s approach of a lockdown instead, as it seemed to be the most effective of the four.

“It remains to be seen whether [China] have herd immunity. In other words, it remains to be seen whether or not enough people got infected in Wuhan in the first epidemic to see whether or not everyone gets protected if the virus comes back. And it’s going to come back.”

As such, the committee was watching Wuhan closely in order to see how they fared.

“We will have some idea from Wuhan as to what herd immunity levels are going to be.”

The Chinese capital of Beijing has had to reimpose a lockdown after a new strain of the coronavirus seems to have emerged and spread leading to yet another spike in cases in certain areas. 

Scientists are now working to trace the strain which they believe was brought to the country from elsewhere. 

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